Reading Recommendations

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In August 2016, David agrees to Dr. Warner's unethical form of therapy consisting of delving into the past and artist dates. Reflecting on the year he turned sixteen, David discovers he had the God-given talent, determination, and a once-in-a-life time opportunity. Several things stood between him and a gold medal at the 1979 World Games Diving Championships, in Tønsberg, Norway: his age, inexperience, family's secrets, and finances.

The springboard finals find David leading the best divers in the world, but shadows of his past try to derail his competitive psyche. With each dive, David must silence the voices in his head to perform a near-perfect final dive and change his life forever.

Returning home to Aulden, Ohio, David is faced with the reality that people aren't what they seem. During a celebration at the White House, President Carter announces that the USA will boycott the 1980 Olympic Games. Upon the disappointment, David accepts a scholarship to prepare for the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, and a possible boyfriend.

Cracked Surface is the sequel to Surface Tension and continues exploring my personal struggle with the desire to lead a “normal” life through the eyes of David Mathew. In Surface Tension, David is sixteen years old, represents the USA, and wins the gold medal at the 1979 World Springboard and Platform Diving Championships in Tønsberg, Norway. David has a secret. In spite of his unprecedented victory, he attempts to hide his tumultuous journey of grooming, manipulation, coercion, and sexual abuse by coaches, benefactors, and medical team he trusted. With his dreams of Olympic glory put on hiatus due to President Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympic Games in Moscow, Russia, David relocates to California to focus on the 1984 Olympics. Cracked Surface continues with David attending the University of California as a pre-med major on academic and athletic scholarships. An encounter with Jennifer, a sorority pledge and theatre major, leads David to help with her audition for the fall play. David gets a part in The Visit of the Old Lady, a lead role in Single Parents a Movie of the Week, and an extra role on ABC’s General Hospital. David’s hopes for normalcy shatter when he finds himself in a clinic and cannot remember where or what had happened the previous evening. Shame and guilt engulf him as he tries to suppress his secret, but at the NCAA Qualifying Diving meet, David blacks out. Without time to put the pieces together, he steps away from school and diving and returns to the farm in Aulden, Ohio to recuperate. While regaining his strength in Aulden, David’s decides to take a year off and attend Wright State University’s Theatre Department to develop his acting and dancing talents, reinvent himself, and explore his spirituality before returning to Hollywood. Cracked Surface demonstrates the struggles and challenges sexually abused people endure as they try to live a normal life. My story of being a sixteen-year-old elite athlete passed around was only the beginning of a lifelong struggle with PTSD, depression, anxiety, and suicidal thoughts. One-in-six males are sexually abused before the age of eighteen. The recent allegations brought against the US Gymnastic and other sporting entities have shed some light on this growing epidemic, but male athletes have been sexually abused for many years and are still in hiding because of societal beliefs that it is just hazing, initiation, the rite of passage, or they myth "males can't be sexually abused." Sexual abuse is only the springboard; the effects may not become evident or recognized until much later in life. By sharing my story, I hope to shed some light on how a sexually abused person attempts to reinvent, adapt, and assimilate to fit into society—but are never able to escape the deep seeded pain without facing the past and finding their true self. 

 A young man rises from the ghetto and struggles against neglect and abuse to become a Hollywood director. My father died ten days after my third birthday and I grew up in a ghetto. The neighborhood was unforgiving, I got into trouble, and my mother sent me away to military school when I was twelve. Life didn’t get any better for a long time. Facing my experiences was too painful at first, so I wrote When The Rain Stops as a novel. But that seemed dishonest, and I started again and wrote my story, about my journey from scared ghetto-kid to Hollywood director. 

“I am grateful to Jennifer Sey for sharing such an honest account of her experiences as an elite gymnast. She has eloquently and fairly exposed a dark side to our sport that parents have long needed to be made aware of.”

—Dominique Moceanu, Olympic Gold Medal Winning Gymnast

Fanciful dreams of becoming the next Nadia Comaneci led Jennifer Sey to become a gymnast at the age of six. Her early success propelled her family to sacrifice everything to help her become, by age 11, one of America’s elite. But as she set her sights higher and higher, Jennifer began to change, setting her needs, her health, and her well-being aside in the name of winning. And the adults in her life refused to notice her downward spiral.

• Now, Sey reveals the tarnish beneath her gold medals. A powerful portrait of intensity and drive, eating disorders and stage parents, abusive coaches and manipulative businessmen, Chalked Up is the story of a young girl whose dreams would become subsumed by the adults around her.

We are born into the school of life. Everything that happens, big and small, soft and hard is a lesson about who we are and how the world works. Once we leave home, it is necessary to reexamine those lessons and the conclusions that we took from them. Only then can we begin to separate from who we were told we were supposed to be and find out who we truly are. 

FTT is a guide to both begin to question and to take some deep hard looks at those conclusions that control how you see the world. It is both validating and confronting while supporting you in uncovering, processing and freeing yourself from ideal, belief's, perspectives and absolute facts that don't work for you anymore. Only then can you create the possibility of knowing you and finding a deep, lasting happiness. 

Too much of life is about running from the pain of the past and present. If you are ready to stop or at least consider stop running, then you are ready for Facing the Truth of Your Life.  

Someone in your past sold you a false story about who you are and what you’re worth. It has been holding you back for too long. Take control of your future.

A staggering one out of three women in America was a victim of sexual abuse at some point in her childhood. No matter how many years it’s been, if that’s your story, those scars are probably still with you. But even if that’s not part of your story, this book is for you. Women today have been groomed for a lot more than just sex.

Using her own story of abuse, family tragedy, and rebellion, Elizabeth Melendez Fisher guides readers toward an understanding that grooming is oftentimes subtle, but it’s always life-altering. In Groomed Fisher incorporates the language and lessons gained over the past decade working with sex trafficking victims and her work in ministry and counseling before that. She draws out five specific ways that women have been groomed, from physical appearance to spirituality to finances, and shows how those manipulative messages have affected the way we see our worth and how they’ve oftentimes stifled and limited us. From there Fisher offers readers a way to overcome their past, starting with the all-important but rarely explored idea of a selah, or a time of rest and reflection, and exploring active ways to forgive and move forward to a new level of freedom.

No one has to be defined by her past. No one has to live for her groomers. It’s time to take a look back at where we came from to escape the messages of our past and take control of our future.

In this raw, unflinching look at how his dream of playing hockey was stolen from him by charismatic hockey coach and sexual predator Graham James, Greg Gilhooly describes in anguishing detail the mental torment he suffered both during and long after the abuse and the terrible reality behind the sanitized term “sexual assault.” Although James has been convicted of sexually assaulting some of his victims, including Sheldon Kennedy and Theo Fleury, he neither confessed in court nor was convicted of sexually assaulting many of his other victims, including Gilhooly, depriving him of the judicial closure he craved. 

Recent events such as the clergy abuse scandal in the Catholic Church have brought the once-taboo subject of childhood sexual abuse to the forefront. But despite increasing awareness of the problem, the United States has not succeeded in establishing effective means of deterring and preventing it, leaving the children of today and tomorrow vulnerable. Hamilton proposes a comprehensive yet simple solution: eliminate the arbitrary statutes of limitation for childhood sexual abuse so that survivors past and present can get into court. Removing this merely procedural barrier permits the millions of survivors to make public the identities of their perpetrators and to receive justice and much-deserved compensation. Standing in the way, however, are formidable opponents such as the insurance industry and the hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church. In Justice Denied, Hamilton predicts a coming civil rights movement for children and explains why it is in the interest of all Americans to allow victims of childhood sexual abuse this chance to seek justice when they are ready. 

Male sexual abuse occurs far more commonly than previously suspected, yet too few victims ever seek support. Countless remain silent. They cope through avoidance, isolation, substance abuse, hyper-masculinity, etc.

Men Too: Unspoken Truths About Male Sexual Abuse is for male survivors and their supporters. It is an educational, heart-wrenching look at 13 male sexual abuse victims experience, written from the perspective of a retired police officer and registered psychologist.

Using their narrative accounts Dr. Palfy offers:

• Healing for male victims through insight and support.
• Strategies for parents and teachers to identify the grooming tactics of predators, plus suggestions to better protect children. 
• Information for helping professionals to recognize traumatized boys and men, plus explanations for why male victims often remain silent for so long.

Conversations about male sexual abuse need to increase. Men Too highlights the complex and unique barriers boys and men face during and after abuse. Help put them on the road to recovery. 

I give this book 5 Stars

Dr. Kelli Palfy breaks the myth, "males can't be sexually abused." One in six males experience sexual abuse before the age of eighteen is the current statistic, but Palfy illustrates that this data is most likely not accurate or current. Society and the expectations of being a man have kept many men silent about their abuse, which has provided predators to prey successfully on male victims and get away with it.  Palfy shares thirteen male sexual abuse victims' stories and carefully identifies and explains the diagnoses for the reader to understand and comprehend. Palfy's approach to the material and stories are transparent and filled with empathy and support for the victims, and this translates to the readers. Palfy's book is valuable for parents and people who support sexually abused male victims. As a survivor of sexual abuse myself, I highly recommend that everyone read this book.

Kathy fell into her sister’s embrace in the Advocate Illinois Masonic Hospital lobby in Chicago. “Just give me the road,” she whispered into the safety of her sister’s arms. “I don’t care how long it takes, just give me the road.” Less than 12 hours earlier, Kathy’s 18-year old son Conor was hit by a car and suffered a life-threatening brain injury while crossing the street in downtown Chicago.

Kathy and Anne Marie navigated a fractured childhood through the eyes of a strong mother whose life example showed them how to live with gratitude and grit despite adversity. Impenetrable sisterhood was cemented by the heartbreak of losing two brothers to suicide and coordinated schedules to care for their elderly mom. They navigated life through partnership and mutual alliance.

Now, Kathy and her family were faced with a lonely and unimaginable anguish as she watched her son lay in a hospital bed with a poor chance for survival. Anne Marie had a front-row seat as Kathy opened herself to grace, searched for good despite repeated tragedy, and leaned on what she knew for sure; the presence of love in all.

Anne Marie engages every reader with honesty and vulnerability into the common space of navigating struggle with a perspective of hope. This is a story of Kathy’s unyielding determination to restore Conor to wellness; weaving a greater story of sisterhood into Kathy’s very personal quest to save her son.

 Dianne Darr Couts' memoir, Things Fell Apart, but the Center Held, spans continents and cultures. It tells the story of Dianne's extraordinary childhood, rich with wonderful experiences juxtaposed with sexual, emotional and spiritual abuse. Personal and institutional betrayal would impact Dianne and her family for life, but her candid memoir also shows how unwavering love, support and courage set the stage for her to thrive in spite of it all.Dianne was born in Akron, Ohio, but her early childhood memories were made in Greenville, South Carolina. Her family returned to Akron when she was six, the year she attended first grade. The next year, Dianne's parents went overseas as missionaries and, because of that, her education continued in a quaint little town near Paris, then in the West African port city of Dakar, back to school in Akron for a year and a half, followed by boarding school in the rain forest of Guinea, West Africa. Her family returned to Akron the year Dianne was a sophomore and then she finished high school on an isolated station on the savanna of Mali, West Africa.Dianne's memoir includes stories of her adventures in all those places, but it also recounts the abuse she experienced. In the final chapters, Dianne reveals how the physical effects of that trauma followed her into adulthood. However, through all the good and bad, Dianne's gratitude shines through for the love and courage of those who defended her as a child, kept her world together and allowed her faith and resiliency to grow. Dianne graduated from the University of Akron and has a Master's Degree in the Art of Teaching from Marygrove College. She is a retired high school teacher whose career of teaching English and French spanned four decades and included teaching in private and public schools in the U.S. and abroad. Dianne and her husband Bud, who have been married for over fifty years, live in Akron, Ohio. They have three married children and seven grandchildren.Drawing on her own experience of trauma and its lasting effects, and on her years as a board member of MK Safety Net, Dianne speaks at national conferences and in churches to raise awareness of abuse in religious settings and to encourage abuse survivors on their healing journeys. 

 A mountain. A blizzard. A young man new to hiking and to love, making mistakes in both. First year of college is a great time to re-invent yourself. Nathan Bartlett takes the opportunity very seriously—maybe a little too seriously. And he makes mistakes. His mistakes? Falling for a straight guy who reminds him of his beloved older brother. Getting too invested in the substance abuse disorders of two other students. And climbing a mountain in a snowstorm for all the wrong reasons.But he also develops friendships that will be his for life. He faces his inner demons and comes up with a plan. And he realizes that answers to important questions are seldom waiting on the surface but must be worked for, or struggled for, or suffered for—and sometimes all three.Nathan is a trailblazer on his own journey. His success will be measured not by how well he follows someone else's path, but by whether he can forge his own. This first book in a series of three novels gets Nathan started on a journey that will teach him about himself, about life, and about love.Walk with him.